Helvetia: One of Arizona's Forgotten Ghost Towns

Suffering from years of exposure to the Sonora Desert's baking sun, annual monsoons and voracious termites, a single rusted strand of bailing wire is all that held the makeshift wooden cross together. It's gained a weather-beaten tilt in the last century, but somehow the posture gives the marker an odd, almost knowing stance as it keeps watch over Helvetia's cemetery. It may last another 100 years if its fate remains overlooked by vandals and untouched by developers.

The rotting cross bears no markings. Anything that may have once indicated the person's name has long since vanished.

When he or she died will remain mystery as well. The cemetery's best-kept marker, a beautiful, though small marble headstone, is for a baby who died back in 1907. This cross, by way of its rudimentary construction, predates that marker by some time.

That it was an adult is moderately certain though. Back then as little energy as possible was expended in burials. Sure the mourners cared, but the concrete-hard soil, and supreme effort required just to scratch out a living made gravesites a simple affair. Its occupant, will probably forever unknown--much like the residents and tireless souls who once called the ghost town of Helvetia, Arizona, home.

Copper was discovered in this region before the Civil War. By the late 1890s, the first three productive claims had been consolidated into the Helvetia Copper Company, based out of New Jersey. When the price of copper plummeted in 1911 the mines closed, though they did briefly reopen during WWI.

Today the buildings, which once included saloons, a post office and smelter, are marked only by piles of adobe silently migrating back into the soil. There are, of course, a few rotting timbers that have been overlooked by vandals. Since most of the miners called a tent home, little remains of the bustling southern Arizona metropolis that once boasted a population that peaked at 300.